What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us

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CreditGérard DuBois

By Joe Karaganis and David McClure

Jan. 22, 2016

COLLEGE course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear.

Some schools archive them, some don’t. Some syllabus archives are public, some aren’t. Some faculty members treat their syllabuses as trade secrets, others are happy to post them online. Despite the bureaucratization of higher education over the past few decades, syllabuses have escaped systematic treatment.

Until now. Over the past two years, we and our partners at the Open Syllabus Project (based at the American Assembly at Columbia) have collected more than a million syllabuses from university websites. We have also begun to extract some of their key components — their metadata — starting with their dates, their schools, their fields of study and the texts that they assign.

This past week, we made available online a beta version of our Syllabus Explorer, which allows this database to be searched. Our hope and expectation is that this tool will enable people to learn new things about teaching, publishing and intellectual history.

At present, the Syllabus Explorer is mostly a tool for counting how often texts are assigned over the past decade. There is something for everyone here. The traditional Western canon dominates the top 100, with Plato’s “Republic” at No. 2, “The Communist Manifesto” at No. 3, and “Frankenstein” at No. 5, followed by Aristotle’s “Ethics,” Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” “Oedipus” and “Hamlet.”

“The Communist Manifesto” ranks as high as it does (for those wondering) because, like “The Republic,” it is frequently taught in multiple fields — notably in history, sociology and political science. Writing guides are also well represented, with “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White at No. 1, as are major textbooks, led by Neil Campbell’s “Biology” at No. 4.

Top articles? Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History.” And so on. Altogether, the Syllabus Explorer tracks about 933,000 works. Nearly half of these are assigned only once.

Such data has many uses. For academics, for example, it offers a window onto something they generally know very little about: how widely their work is read.

It also allows us to introduce a new publication metric based on the frequency with which works are taught, which we call the “teaching score.” The score is derived from the ranking order of the text, not the raw number of citations, such that a book or article that is used in four or five classes gets a score of 1, while “The Republic,” which is assigned 3,500 times, gets a score of 100.

Many academics are uncomfortable with this sort of numerical reduction of intellectual work. Taken in isolation, we share this concern. But there is a broader context here: At present, publication metrics basically involve counting the citations of a given academic work in other academic publications. And since it can take years for an influential work to accumulate citations, shortcuts have become popular, such as the “journal impact factor,” which scores journal articles based on journal rankings that are determined by the journals’ own frequency of citation in other journals.

Such metrics are controversial, and with good reason: They capture only a narrow range of the things academics do and value. Journals, in particular, exist mostly to advance the state of research in specialized fields, and therefore they privilege work that is often by necessity (though also sometimes just by ingrained habit) esoteric. This is not a bad thing, but when used to derive performance metrics, it creates a clear set of signals to academics about how they should be spending their time and whom they should be writing for.

IF you like the idea of a more publicly engaged academy, you need to look elsewhere for incentives. And that’s where we think our “teaching score” metric could be useful. Teaching captures a very different set of judgments about what is important than publication does. In particular, it accords more value to qualities that are useful in the classroom, like accessibility and clarity. A widely taught but infrequently cited article is an important achievement, but an invisible one to current impact metrics.

We don’t think either approach to measuring the influence of a work is better than the other. But we do think that the academy is better off when it has multiple methods for valuing the wide range of work academics do.

An important caveat about the Syllabus Explorer results: They reflect the collection of syllabuses that we have gathered so far, which is large enough to give interesting results but far from complete. It is a work in progress on many levels, and one that depends on a culture of open bibliographic data-sharing in the academy.

Because of a complex mix of privacy and copyright issues concerning syllabuses, the Open Syllabus Project publishes only metadata, not the underlying documents or any personally identifying material (even though these documents can be viewed on university websites). But we think that it is important for schools to move toward a more open approach to curriculums. As universities face growing pressure to justify their teaching and research missions, we doubt that curricular obscurity is helpful.

We think that the Syllabus Explorer demonstrates how more open strategies can support teaching, diversify evaluation practices and offer new perspectives on publishing, scholarship and intellectual traditions. But as with any newly published work, that judgment now passes out of our hands and into yours.

Joe Karaganis is vice president of the American Assembly, a public policy institute at Columbia. David McClure is a software engineer at the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research at Stanford.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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